Sea Monkeys
by Queen Edmund Pevensie
Summary: weechesters. John hates it when the boys cry, especially over something so silly. Sam is two-and-a-half, Dean just turned seven. Fluff.


When the kids cry, John panics even though every single person he's ever met has told him that _kids cry. _It doesn't matter, because every single time he hears Sammy wail, or Dean sniffling, he thinks that this is it. The thing he's been chasing, the thing _he's been running from_ for two years now has caught up to them.

"Daddy!" Sammy wails, running across their apartment, sliding in his socks. Sammy is two-and-a-half as he tells anyone who will listen. He has recently decided, much to John's constant frustration, that shoes are completely useless, especially if he can just get Daddy to carry him. But it's February, Dean just turned seven, and even with the heat on, the apartment is still cold, so John has somehow willed socks onto Sammy's feet. Not any number of the pairs of _Sam's_ socks, of course. Not even Dean's socks. John's socks, which are much,_ much_ too big for tiny two-and-a-half year old feet.

Sam almost trips into John's lap as he comes skidding to a halt in front of his father, whose sitting at the kitchen table reading about a job in town that maybe he could take while the boys are settling here. Sam is panting a little with a very earnest, but _unharmed, _look on his face when he says, "Daddy, Dean is crying."

That little burst of panic spurts through him when he hears those words, but instead of pulling out every weapon he owns and fixing the problem the way he wants to instinctually, he picks Sammy up from the floor and plops him on his lap, pulling the socks further onto his feet so he won't trip and fall when he inevitably starts running again. Not that there's a lot of furniture to bump into, but better safe than sorry.

"Why is he crying, Sammy?" asks John.

Sam shrugs and sighs. "Something about sea monkeys," he explains. "He said not to tell you 'cause it's stupid, but I tell you anyway."

"He's still upset about the sea monkeys?" John asks, not really to Sam, who gives a frustrated huff and squirms down from John's lap. "Let's go and see then, shall we, Sam?"

Sam leads the way to his and Dean's room, where Dean is sitting cross-legged, also in socks, with his head in his hands, occasionally sneaking a peek at his sea monkey farm that was sitting in front of him. Each time he did, he would bury his face in his hands again and cry some more.

John sighs. Dean had begged John for weeks about getting these sea monkeys. Sam took it as an opportunity to beg for a puppy. Every time they would pass a toy store, Dean would tug on John's coat and say, "Dad, can I get sea monkeys?" To which Sam would say, "Puppy?"

Ignoring Sam completely, John said he would think about it, and when Dean's birthday came around, Dean translated Sam's card, and opened up John's gift with the biggest smile on his face that John had seen in two years.

"Wow! Sea monkeys!" exclaimed Dean.

"Puppy?" asked Sam.

But now, John was wondering if they were more trouble than they were worth.

"See?" says Sam, pointing at Dean like John hadn't believed him. Dean shoves Sam's hand away irritably.

"I told you not to tell him," Dean grumbles, shoving Sam's hand away harder when it comes swinging right back into his face.

"I tell him," Sam informs Dean matter-of-factly, dangling his finger in front of Dean's nose, and Dean almost shoves Sam into his bed this time, but John catches Sam just in time.

Dumping Sam onto the bed before he can aggravate Dean into a wrestling that match Sammy is doomed to lose, John squats down next to Dean to investigate what exactly the problem with the sea monkeys is this time.

"They're not _real, _Dad," Dean grumbles staring despondently into the murky water. John squints. They look real enough to him, swimming around pathetically in their ridiculous sea monkey castle.

"Sure they're real," John says. He's missing something. He always seems to be missing something these days, but usually he can figure it out. But even as ridiculous as the sea monkeys are, they're definitely _real. _

"No, Dad, they're not," Dean insists, deadly serious, looking John right in the eye, daring him to say otherwise. John realizes it's not important whether or not the sea monkeys are in fact _real_, but only that Dean has somehow convinced himself that they're not, and that he's gotten himself so worked up about it that his eyes are red and watery, and there's snot coming out of his nose from crying so hard.

John reaches over and grabs a tissue out of a tissue box that's sitting on the nightstand between Sam and Dean's bed, wiping Dean's nose for him, and then wiping Dean's tears away from his eyes with his thumb. "What makes you say that, bud?" he asks gently.

"They're not _real,_" Dean whines. "They're not –" Dean groans and looks around his room frantically for something, finally coming up with the box the sea monkeys came in. "They're not _real,_" he says again emphatically, pointing with as much vigor as he can muster to the sea monkey cartoons on the box.

They're not actual sea _monkeys_, John realizes, or, better yet, not tiny little sea people who _look _like monkeys, with jobs and lives and families. John can't help himself, and he laughs a little, picking Dean up off the ground, taking the box gently from Dean's hands, and sitting Dean in his lap, holding the cartoon out so they both can see.

"It's kind of a rip off, eh?" he says to Dean. Dean nods sadly. "That's what you get for buying pets at toys stores though."

Dean sighs. "All the kids at school have sea monkeys and they said they're so cool," Dean tells John. "They're _not cool._"

"Yeah," John agrees. "Not cool at all."

"You can hardly even see them," says Dean, squinting at the aquarium again.

John tosses the box over Dean's head into the trashcan. Sam climbs down off the bed and also climbs onto John's lap. With no hands free, John reaches around his boys and picks up the sea monkeys and holds it out to them. "You can definitely see them," John decides after some thought.

"I can," says Sam. "Cool."

"Sammy thinks they're cool," John points out. "They're kind of cool."

Dean shrugs and takes them back from John, looking hard at the swirling mass of tiny little shrimp floating in their underwater zoo. "I guess so," Dean sighs.

"And hey," John says suddenly, turning Dean around in his lap with one hand. "They're good for something else too."

"What?"

"Good for learning responsibility," says John. Dean gives him a look. "Yeah," he says. "You have to make sure that you feed your sea monkeys because no sea monkey mom is going to make them sea monkey pot roast."

Dean looks up at John sadly. "Like us?" he asks.

"Not quite," he says. "Here you got a dad who makes chicken nuggets. They don't have anybody."

"Oh."

"Just you, Deano," says John. "Think you can handle that?"

"Yeah, I think so, Dad," says Dean.

"So do I," agrees John. Sam is reaching across John's lap to touch the sea monkeys and Dean looks about ready to hit Sam again, so John slides Dean off his lap and slings Sam over his shoulders. "Now, if you'll excuse me," he says. "_Your _sea monkey dad has to go make some phone calls to see if he can find you a babysitter for next week." John stands up with a grunt and Sam clings onto the hair on his head.

John doesn't like it when his boys cry because it might be the end of them or the end of him, but he doesn't like it when his boys cry because sometimes, they just cry about normal kid stuff too, and really, that's what scares John the most.


End file.
